Modern Language Initiative

The Forgiveness to Come

Peter Banki

This book is concerned with the aporias, or impasses, of forgiveness, especially in relation to the legacy of the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Nazis and their collaborators during World...

Fictitious Capital

Elizabeth M. Holt

The ups and downs of silk, cotton and stocks synchopated with serialized novels in the late nineteenth-century Arabic press; time itself was changing. Khalīl al-Khūrī, Salīm al-Bustānī, and Jurjī Zaydān wrote novels of debt, dissimulation, and risk, increasingly legible as tools of French and British empire.

The Future Life of Trauma

Jennifer Yusin

The Future Life of Trauma discusses the intersections between psychoanalysis and postcolonial studies in the concept of trauma. It examines the character of the traumatic event as it occurs in the Freudian metapsychology, the 1947 Partition of British India, and the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Decreation and the Ethical Bind

Yoon Sook Cha

A close reading of Simone Weil’s philosophical and literary writings examining themes of ethical obligation, dispossession and vulnerability in relation to the works of Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot and Judith Butler.

Bilingual Brokers

Jeehyun Lim

Bilingual Brokers examines bilingual personhood in Asian American and Latino literature through postwar debates on bilingualism to illustrate a regime of flexible inclusion where an economic calculus of value for racialized subjects crystallizes at the intersections of language and racial difference and is used in deliberations of social worthiness.

Sexagon

Mehammed Amadeus Mack

Sexagon examines how Muslim immigrants from North Africa—as well as their French descendants—have had their level of assimilation to French Culture evaluated according to their attitudes about gender and sexuality. Mack contends that French Arab and Muslim minorities have had their French-ness rejected not because of any linguistic or civic barrier, but rather due to their perceived inadequacy at the level of sexual liberation.

Post-Mandarin

The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature

Andrew Hui

The book argues that the Renaissance was the Ruin-naissance, the birth of the ruin as category of discourse that inspired voluminous poetic production. By examining Petrarch, Du Bellay, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Spenser, and Shakespeare, Hui explains how writers used the ruin to think about their relationship to classical antiquity.